But to the AFRL, more important than the launch is what the researchers will learn from the launch and the satellite’s experiments.

For Colonel David B. Goldstein, who is the director, Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate and commander, Phillips Research Site, the satellite itself is an experiment in many ways.

Things will go wrong. Not everything will go to the plan.

But that’s OK, he said.

“You have the permission to take risks. If you fail, that’s fine. You learn from that,” Goldstein told Business First on Wednesday. “But you have to have the freedom to fail, and if not, they won’t be innovative. To me, that’s been one of the unique things about the AFRL. We need to take risks. If you don’t take risks, we’ll fall short of state-of-the-art, and we have to have to have the freedom to fail.”

“Now, I don’t want to fail,” he said. “But I’ve seen, through my career, anytime you have an anomaly or failure, every time we fail, we learn so much.”

The new ANGELS satellite is designed to see how satellites in geosynchronous orbit above the planet interact, what they’re doing and how they do it.

But for Goldstein, the real excitement is in putting the team together.

“We’ll have a team that will be operating 24/7 for the next two weeks and then following this plan,” he said. “We’ll have to deal with adversity and the challenges, and a lot will be learned about leadership and how folks have to get along.”

“For me, that’s the leadership challenge, keeping that team together through the adversity that you’ll have to face. It never works out perfectly. But to me, that’s the exciting thing with the Air Force. You face adversity, and you have singular mission, and you have to come out the other side because you know that what you’re doing is going to serve your nation.”

Regardless, he said, the launch on Wednesday is a culmination of years of work that will go on with a new satellite, called Eagle.

The new satellite, being designed in Albuquerque, will use an innovative new ring that will allow it to, in essence, ride in the trunk of a Delta IV rocket.

“It’s a ring that sits in between where the prime satellite is and the lower part of the rocket. It’s utilizing the extra space of the rocket for free. It ends up being a very reasonable way to get a ride on a rocket, and you can tag along,” Goldstein said. “We have this Eagle experiment that’s coming up. There are experiments on it, and there’s six experiments that are on the sides of it. It’s a neat technology going forward that we can get other experiments on board. We can also get things flown cheaply, and it’s an experiment within experiments.”

The launch is scheduled to take place between 5:00 p.m. and 6:10 p.m. A live webcast of the launch is available at http://www.ulalaunch.com.